Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A Guide To Canadian Coins

The penny is brown. It looks like a little piece of rust. If you’ve gotten them back in your change, you know they also smell like cold shit. The penny has a maple leaf branch on it and, if I’m seeing it correctly, the shadow on the bottom of the branch indicates it has been severed from the tree.
Awesome. First up in Canadian currency: dead plants.

You know that 'take a penny, leave a penny' tray? I always take a penny. They don’t say you have to do both. Does anyone even care about pennies anymore? When I get change back and it’s less than five cents, I just walk away without it. Four is the maximum amount of pennies you should be carrying at any given time. Any more and you could just trade up to a nickel. Pocket space is at a premium these days. We’re in a recession, we don’t have room for measly pennies.

For his 16th birthday, I gave Nate $16 in pennies. 1600 pennies. I put them in a cookie tin. But I didn’t mention the amount nor did he bother to count it so, for the longest time, he thought I had just given him a shitload of pennies because I’m an asshole. In hindsight, I could have also given him coin rollers.

Then the nickel has a beaver on it. Fucker looks like he’s taking a nap.

Dime? No better. An old sailboat? Boring. It might be a little late to mention that the Queen is so pretentious that she’s on the back of all the coins, so I'm not even featuring her once.

Caribou on the quarter. I bet most Canadians would even call this a moose. No matter. It’s probably just as dead as the leaves on the penny, so let’s move on.

I’m not covering the fifty cent piece because who the hell uses a fifty cent piece? I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one.

The one dollar coin is called a loonie. Cuz there’s a loon on it. Not much thought went into that one. We probably had a lot to drink that weekend.

Genuis attack, part two. The two dollar coin is called a toonie. For some reason, it has a polar bear on it. He looks like he's stuck on an ice floe, the poor bastard. And anybody who spells toonie like ‘twonie’ should get kicked right in the nuts.

Why do we have animals all over our money? Is it because we love animals? No. It’s because we like to hunt. That means we have a lot of guns.